


the one that could have gone better

by skioctober



Series: ode to self-indulgence [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, BACK ON MY BULLSHIT, F/M, Self-Insert, if sis gets her man i get mine, more or less
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-23
Updated: 2019-04-23
Packaged: 2020-01-24 15:57:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18574756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skioctober/pseuds/skioctober
Summary: James Barnes, however, could go straight to hell and burn there for eternity as far as Anna is concerned.Because really, she thinks. That was my favorite fucking blouse.





	the one that could have gone better

**Author's Note:**

> Well, here we are again.
> 
> 'the one with the meetcute' was supposed to be a one-off, but then it kind of grew and grew and became its own little universe. I have several scenes written up for it now, I've just delayed posting because trying to come up with titles is a bitch and a half.
> 
> So far I'm happy with this, so hopefully y'all enjoy this little follow-up and leave some feedback.

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When her sister calls to ask if she'd be free for dinner, Anna considers telling her no.

It's Friday, thankfully, but the morning gets off to a rough start and the rest of her agenda seems determined to follow suit.

Her job isn't particularly difficult and she's generally good at it, but when one little thing after another starts to go wrong the effect tends to snowball.

Tara mixes up some of their files, resulting in confidential information being sent to the wrong people. Mrs. Chapman called out at 7:39, citing a family emergency, so the payroll is entered an hour late by one of the interns.

Three separate clients phone in, up in arms over some misinformation, and all of them threaten to pull out of their deals. It takes Anna and her supervisor two hours to placate them and preserve the orders, which pushes them behind schedule.

Due to the uproar, she's two hours late leaving the office. The traffic in town is a nightmare at seven o'clock and the headache that formed during lunch flares up sharply.

And her favorite blouse is _still_ stained with the latte she never got to drink.

Just recalling the incident makes her head throb angrily. The man hadn't meant to run into her, she knows. It had been a complete accident. But her drink had spilled all down her front, staining the cream silk and singeing her skin.

The problem, she thinks testily, is that he hadn't even apologized. Worse, he'd grinned and made a rather lewd remark about the transparency of her soaked top.

He was an astoundingly handsome man, and under different circumstances she may have tried to flirt with him. As it was, the ordeal snapped her already brittle patience – she is not and never will be a morning person – and she'd made some rude remarks of her own before storming out of the cafe.

She stews about it, and the entire bloody day, on the drive home. Is still steaming when she walks in the door of her apartment and her phone rings – Alyssa calling to invite her out with Steve and James.

Anna waffles over it. She has plenty of time to change and meet them downtown, but she's been not-so-subtly avoiding her sister's attempts to set her up with Steve's best friend.

Anna has met Steve several times since Alyssa started seeing him, and he's pretty much perfect. His thoughtfulness and humor and impeccable manners have endeared him to her, and that approval had had Alyssa beaming for days.

And she's happy for them, really. Her sister is a wonderful person who deserves the good relationship she's in right now. But because Alyssa is happy, she seems to think Anna needs to be happy and has been trying, equally without subtlety, to push James and Anna together.

Anna believes Alyssa's assurances that James is a great guy – he couldn't be otherwise if he was friends with someone like Steve – but if she's being honest with herself, Anna knows she's just being skittish.

It's been two years, but the effects of having her heart smashed to pieces still linger here and there. It's hard to let go.

Alyssa knows this, of course. She's more observant than she gets credit for and she knows her sister like the back of her hand. Which is why she cuts straight to the point when Anna starts to make her excuses for the umpteenth time.

“Stop wallowing,” she says, more sharply than usual. “How long are you going to bury yourself in your work and pretend other guys don't exist?”

“I don't pretend they don't exist,” Anna mutters, defensive. “And my job does take up a lot of my time.”

“That's bullshit and you know it.” Alyssa sighs, then softens her voice. “Listen, I'm not trying to marry you off. You know I'd never do that, I'm not Nana. But girl you need to get out. All you do is work and then go home to your cats.”

“Hey, don't insult Frankie and Pickles. They love me unconditionally and only slightly judge me for eating Nutella out of the jar at four AM.”

“Anna. Do you hear yourself?”

“Alyssa...”

“Listen. I just want you to come out and have some fun with us. Would I be delighted if you and James hit it off? Hell yeah, but if you don't it's not the end of the world. But you worry me when all you do is work and sleep.”

Anna sighs, guilty now. “I'm sorry.”

“It's fine, I know you're not doing it on purpose. But things with The Asshole happened two years ago. Stop letting him drag you down. Come out and have some drinks with us. It's good for you.”

“That's what you said last time...”

“Hey, nobody told you to knock back that fifth tequila shot. That's on you, you dumb bitch.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“So are you coming or not? Steve wants to hang out with you, too. He's making The Face™.”

Anna groans, trying not to laugh. “Oh no, not The Face™!”

“Oh yeah. So is that a yes?”

“Ugh, I guess. What time?”

“Eh, let's say 8:30. No rush.”

“Alright, let me change and I'll head that way. Have an Old Fashioned ready for me.”

“Yes, ma'am! See you soon.”

Anna shakes her head, wandering into the kitchen to feed the cats before she leaves. She's still not really in the mood to go out, but she can't back out now.

In the bedroom, she changes out of her dirty blouse, swapping it for a green wrap top gifted by one of her friends. It made her eyes pop and showed just enough cleavage to catch someone's eye.

If she's going to go out, she's going all the way.

She runs a brush through her hair, longer than ever, and reapplies her lipstick. In the hall she exchanges her pumps for heeled boots and grabs her coat from the closet.

It's not quite November yet, but the chill of the season is already moving in, and it's damp from the rain they've had all week. She makes sure there's cash in her wallet and grabs her keys off the hook, locking up behind her.

She takes an Uber to the restaurant, just in case she has more than an Old Fashioned, following the address Alyssa texts her. The traffic hasn't improved much and now there's a light drizzle coming down, just enough to make everything hazy.

She arrives closer to 8:45, so everyone else is already seated and waiting. She spies the cocktail in front of her empty seat and starts to smile, finally a little excited, but the expression vanishes when she sees the man sitting in the booth.

Alyssa looks up and sees her, smiles brightly and waves. “Took you long enough, hoe, but here's your old man drink. This is –”

“ _You fucking asshole!_ ”

The outburst surprises them all, including Anna herself. Thankfully it isn't so loud as to attract attention from the other diners, but it still has Steve's eyebrows skyrocketing.

Alyssa glares at her. “What the fuck, dude?”

Anna points at the man, rather rudely. “He ruined my good blouse this morning!”

Steve and Alyssa exchange baffled glances. The man – James, obviously, and isn't that some goddamn irony? - peers up at her with blue-grey eyes that at any other moment she would have found pretty.

Just now, they're irritatingly amused and she'd like nothing more than to claw them out of his smug face. His smug, _pretty_ face.

Goddammit.

“You two have already met?” Steve asks. He looks between James and Anna, clearly confused and awaiting explanation.

“We met,” Anna says, curtly, glaring at James. “When he ran into me, dumped my coffee on me, and then instead of apologizing made an awful joke about how see-through my blouse was.”

The look Steve pins on James could make even Hitler duck his head in shame. “Buck, come on.”

James shrugs, a careless gesture, and the movement draws her eyes to his stump of a left arm. She remembers Alyssa telling her that he'd lost it overseas, serving in the Army, and a delicate tendril of sympathy tries to wind its way up.

She squashes it ruthlessly.

“It was an accident,” he says now, glancing slyly at her from the corner of his eye. “That shirt probably looked better off anyway.”

For a terrible moment, Anna considers taking the drink her sister had ordered for her and splashing it in his eyes. And she nearly does, fingers twitching toward the glass.

Some of her intent must come through, because Alyssa reaches over to put a hand on her wrist. It diverts the sharpest edge of her temper, but she's still hot.

She does pick up the drink, but only to down it in one go. The whiskey burns all the way down to settle molten in her belly. Any desire she had to stay and visit dries up.

She says nothing else, simply takes some cash out of her wallet and slaps it down on the table. “That should cover the cocktail. Thanks for inviting me out, but I'm just not feeling it tonight.”

She offers Steve and Alyssa a tight smile, already feeling guilty for the disappointment in her sister's eyes, and turns to leave. She doesn't acknowledge James.

And misses the surprise, and contrition, that flits across his face.

The rain is coming down hard outside now, washing everything in black and gray. Only the neon signs and traffic lights have any color, and they all seem sickly bright to her.

She regrets now not taking her own car, cursing having to wait for an Uber to pull up, but soon enough she's climbing into a dinged up sedan and speeding back toward her neighborhood.

It was a mistake to go out, she thinks. She should have known better, and the disappointment is all the more keen for the little ray of hope she'd allowed herself to feel.

At least that hope had been dashed at the start, instead of three years after the fact. Better to find out now, she rations.

It's a hollow consolation.

Frankie and Pickles welcome her home by stepping out and tripping her up, nearly resulting in a twisted ankle. But when she changes into pajamas and curls up on the couch to browse Netflix, the felines cuddle up close and purr loud as motors. She forgives them.

She does not forgive James. His crimes are petty in the grand scheme of things and it's not like her to hold a grudge, but something about his smug expression, the arrogant flash in his eyes, gets her dander up.

She'll have to call Alyssa in the morning and apologize, maybe take her out to breakfast. Alyssa's intentions had been good, it wasn't her fault Anna and James had already had a run-in. With her sister, at least, Anna can make amends.

James Barnes, however, could go straight to hell and burn there for eternity as far as Anna is concerned.

 _Because really_ , she thinks, tuning into an episode of Planet Earth and allowing David Attenborough's iconic voice to soothe her frayed nerves. _That was my favorite fucking blouse._

 

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Back at the restaurant, Steve is staring down his best friend much the way a parent might look on their misbehaving child.

Another time, Alyssa would find that hilarious. As it is, her sister's feelings have been involved and that will not be tolerated.

Not for a minute.

“Mind telling me what that was about?” she asks, the stern mother to Steve's disappointed father. “I know you're a flirt, but that was pretty sleazy.”

“It was,” he admits, swirling his drink absently. “I'm sorry.”

“Don't apologize to me,” she says flatly. “I had to practically beg her to come out tonight. I can't help it if y'all had a run-in this morning, but this was a good opportunity for you to _apologize_ so that we could all have a nice time.”

“It was,” he says again. He takes a sip of his drink, barely tastes the bourbon when it burns its way down.

“I'm not saying she was right to cuss you, either, that was her temper getting away from her. But she's had a shitty day, and an even shittier two years, and I'm just praying this didn't set her back any.”

Steve rubs a large hand over his face. “Why would you even say something like that? Just now, or earlier this morning – it's not like you. Bein' a flirt's one thing, but a creep's another.”

James sighs, heavy and a touch embarrassed. “This morning I bumped into her and it really was an accident. And I _was_ gonna apologize. But then I got a look at her and she was just so flustered and pretty and it made me nervous, and I can't remember the last time a woman made me nervous, and I just... I don't know, I said the first stupid thing that came to mind. She got mad, said some words of her own, stormed off – I didn't get another chance to say anything.”

“I'm not saying that I don't believe you,” Alyssa begins. “Or that your reason isn't valid, because I get that shit happens, but do you know what would happen if you told my sister you were a jerk to her _because you liked her_?”

James quirks an eyebrow in question.

“She would chew you up and spit you out.”

He grins, but it doesn't quite reach his eyes. “I might enjoy that.”

“Buck, be serious.” Steve leans forward, stern intent radiating from his large frame. “Even if that's what happened this morning, why did you do it again tonight?”

“Honestly, her cussin' at me and callin' me an asshole, even if I was one, rubbed me the wrong way and I decided two could play at that game.” He frowns. “Didn't think she'd get mad and just leave, though.”

“That's because you don't know her very well,” Alyssa mutters dryly. Then she sighs, downs the rest of her drink. “Look, don't worry about it anymore tonight. She'll probably call me in the morning and I'll see what I can smooth over.”

“I appreciate that,” James says stiffly, shamed and uncomfortable.

“You still owe her an apology.” Alyssa looks at him pointedly. “But I'll make sure you get one from her, too.”

Steve pays the tab, James leaves the tip, and both walk Alyssa outside. James hops in the first cab that happens by, sinking sullenly into the backseat to brood, leaving Steve and Alyssa to make their way back to the car.

“Well, that could have gone better,” she says, fiddling idly with the radio. All she gets is static or rap, so she flips it off in disgust.

Steve glances over at her as they stop at a red light. “Could have gone worse.”

“Yeah,” she agrees. “Anna could have thrown her drink in his face. Thank God I stopped that one.”

Steve chuckles at that, reaches over to take her hand. “We can't take them anywhere, can we?”

“No,” she murmurs, twining their fingers together, bringing them up to her lips for a light kiss. “No, we can't.”

 

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End file.
